RAE BK has never been one for the white-cube life. The Brooklyn-based street artist built his reputation in unpermitted spaces—sidewalk installations, guerrilla sculptures, durational performances in storefront windows—where art rubs shoulders with the city’s ambient chaos. It’s fitting that his latest, largest project to date lives not in a museum but in a soon-to-be-demolished 1,200-square-foot ranch house on Samsonville Road in Kerhonkson.
“Faraday Cage,” which opens on Saturday, August 16 from 12-6pm, transforms the home’s seven rooms into an immersive meditation on isolation, political drift, and the coping rituals people invent when reality gets too heavy. It’s part sanctuary, part mental prison. RAE spent a year and a half conceiving the work, nine months of it on-site, scavenging materials from Craigslist and beyond, soldering circuit boards with the remote guidance of a technician in Pakistan, and assembling a cast of animatronic stand-ins for human contact.
The title nods to the electromagnetic shielding device, a metaphor for blocking signals—literal and ideological. “I was thinking about the state of our politics and society now, and how your location influences that,” RAE says. “As an urban artist, what would it be like to move up here, isolate myself, and be around people that, as a whole, aren’t as liberal? Would I be one of those people?”
The work imagines a white male protagonist who has lost his family—whether through changed values or other ruptures—and retreated into a rural compound. The figures in the house, each in their own tableau, are his imagined replacements for human contact. In one room, animatronic family members fuss with games and meals, their repetitive motions serving as stand-ins for real conversation. In another, a kitchen scene drifts toward estrangement, each figure absorbed in its own screen, the idea of connection present only as residue.
Some spaces probe the influence of media and the comfort of conspiracy. In one room, a mannequin in a USA tracksuit slouches before a wall of a dozen TVs streaming news, podcasts, and political punditry. Above him, a news ticker flips from “Breaking News” to “Broken News.” RAE describes him as someone whose isolation has made him “more guarded, more self-reliant, even a bit paranoid.” The constant stream of information, he notes, can feel “both like a lifeline and a threat.”
Other rooms lean toward self-reliance fantasies. A greenhouse tucked into a repurposed shower grows vegetables under lights, underscoring themes of survival and withdrawal from unstable systems. Another room houses a collection of firearms, leavened by a bright plastic Super Soaker—a wink to RAE’s instinct for undercutting menace with humor.
The installation isn’t limited to the interior. On a visit earlier this week just before the installation’s opening on August 16, RAE was finishing painting the exterior—roof and all—metallic silver, turning the house into a gleaming box in the woods, a literal Faraday cage. That deadline is also when the installation will close; after that, the house will be razed.
Working in Kerhonkson has pushed RAE into new territory. Known for urban interventions like “Word of Mouth”—a full-scale artistic takeover of a bodega on the Lower East Side—and the month he lived in a storefront window, he’s now staging his work in a rural context where drop-in visitors are more likely to be selling aluminum siding than gallery-hopping. Still, he’s kept the door open—literally. A roadside sign invites passersby to stop in.
“It’s the same approach,” he says. “I want the work accessible for the everyday person. Living in a window in the city, you’d walk by on your way to work—that’s still street art to me. Here, it’s a house just sitting there. If someone sees the sign, they can come in.”
Two of the rooms function as traditional gallery spaces, showing RAE’s paintings and sculptures—work that’s for sale, along with a scattering of drawings as well as silkscreened vintage jackets and T-shirts.
For all its themes of disconnection, “Faraday Cage” is deeply personal. It’s about what happens in the absence of human touch, about how isolation can harden into ideology, about the rituals—some tender, some toxic—that fill the gap. And it’s about the stubborn, sometimes absurd labor of making art in the face of indifference.
RAE’s work has always blurred boundaries: public and private, art and life, earnestness and satire. In Kerhonkson, he’s built not just an installation, but a world, and invited us inside before the bulldozers come at the end of November.
“Faraday Cage” will be exhibited at 1049 Samsonville Road in Kerhonkson on Saturdays and Sundays from 12-6pm through November 30. The exhibition contains mature content and is recommended for those 16 and older.
This article appears in September 2025 and August 2025.
